


sear through you

by TheTacticianMagician



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters: Sun & Moon | Pokemon Sun & Moon Versions
Genre: F/M, Hopeful Ending, Interspecies Relationship(s), Interspecies Romance, POV Second Person, Past Character Death, Past Relationship(s), Vague pace, Violence, i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-09 02:07:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8871523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTacticianMagician/pseuds/TheTacticianMagician
Summary: There's burns that rawst berries could never heal, but no one teaches you about that.





	

**Author's Note:**

> \- writes my first second-person pov fic with no planning whatsoever  
> \- ok

  
You are a bitter and hurting cocoon. Not even allowed to have pokémon, any, not for company or for training or even to get close to one. Well, in the heart of corruption, anything you do is illegal.   
  
Null was warming up to you, and you don't know if you hope it's personal or just because it's glad to be free. It has accepted to be housed in your pokéball to not be seen by others, but if it was your choice you would take it by your side at all times.   
  
It would be easier for you to pretend you've lost love, you've lost the ability to care, and justice and need for power are what you require. But you don't harbor bloodlust and every time Null is hurt in battle you can feel the edges of your eyes watering up. You can't even muster yourself to think,  _ pathetic _ . You love it too much. You feel you may be growing to love it almost as much as you loved her.   
  
The tendrils in your heart seem to swell and crush you every time you think of her.    
  
She was a salandit at first, one rescued off Route 8 after being run over by a Stoutland in search, and she healed really quickly. She bonded easily with the two male salandit already in Aether Paradise, and of course, you bonded with her as well.   
  
So friendly and lovable. Most of the people at Aether were fine not giving names to any of the pokémon, but you don't like that. You think it's like quantifying them and stripping them of uniqueness. You warm her and her partners to their names. You say "Muni", and she croons something like "Mana", so you call her Mana by her preference. The males, you call Luzei and Salmi, and they are thrilled to be able to be called out individually. They give their love by rubbing up warmly on your legs and leaving your whole being smelling oddly sweet.   
  
There's people who will ramp up the deadliness of poison-types, and sometimes they're right. But their toxicity is highly variable according to their environment and diet. Grimers raised in distant isolated islands can almost acquire a water-esque clearness and lack power. Salandits earn most of their potency in the wild by gobbling up coal, acidic minerals, licking up sulphur veins and eating prey, not leaving anything behind. Of course you can't be so sure, but with these salandits at Aether only eating berries, beans, nurtured bark and poffins, it feels like their sweet scents could never actually sicken or kill you.   
  
You grow so attached. You spend more time with them than anyone else. Mana is usually the center of attention and the three of you boys treat her like a queen.   
  
Perhaps that's what gets her to evolve, ultimately. Small before, she is almost your height now. If you both laid down, her tail would make her surpass your length. Salmi and Luzei can hug at your knees, and they do, but now Mana can hug your chest and doesn't need to be picked up to reach your shoulder. She's even more beautiful now. You aren't sure of when you fall, but by the time you notice there's no catching yourself. You're in love, and she didn't even try.   
  
You read up more extensively on the salandit line. No male salazzles found, females would sometimes surround themselves with fawning male salandits. A few reports of the line attempting to court other species, humans included. None of the reports are more than vague.   
  
But there's a realization that she hasn't tried to snatch you, not on purpose, and every feeling mixes up within you all at once. That means she might not feel the same, not have any interest and why should she? If they were different species, and he was such a weakling, he was not worthy, and how would it work?   
  
There's no fighting it, however. You feel some jealousy towards the small males; would they be luckier? Humiliatingly, a part of you hopes that if she were to make a harem with them, that you'd be part of it. Wonder if that would make a difference since the four of you are close friends already.   
  
She comes to spend more time with you though. Shares her beans, the yellow dot ones, her favourites. Nuzzles your neck right up to your jaw, calls you up in the evening to look out upon the sea and watch her make pretty shapes with flame against the starry sky, is twice as demanding as the boys about rolling over and getting belly rubs from you, her smell seeps so thick into your coat you brace your nose against it some late nights as you let your hand breach your underclothes and your body quakes in imagining her.   
  
Wicke might be the only one who notices your rare smiles are around the salamanders, and she's your saviour, as you have a paranoid inkling that not all Aether employees are happy to keep (mostly) healthy pokémon up and around most of the building, especially predators, when they could be sent out into the wild again. Wicke ensures they stay there. If you wished to set out alone if they were sent away, how would that look like?   
  
You loved Mana, and it hurt because all you could do was try to suppress it.   
  
Until she loved you too.   
  
When she insisted on sleeping on your bed with you, when you nuzzled and nuzzled each other's faces until you couldn't take it anymore and you kissed her, and the sound out of her maw then was like a happy laugh. That felt like the most joyous moment of your life.   
  
Like you didn't need anything else so long as you had this.   
  
You can recall the sensation of her thick tongue in your mouth, down your throat. The heat of her neck drying your tears the day you spoke up at your mother and got a head-turning handful on your face, and the fact she'd done that to her own son stung more than the slap. When a typhoon visited the mid-sea structure, Mana curled up around you to make you feel safe. You always snuck out sweets for her, and she and the boys were the happiest when you shared malasadas and patterned beans.   
  
You remember wanting to spend every single night with her the first time you pushed into her, her heat unbearable, her pleasured croons joining your desperate sounds, tail slung around your back and over your shoulder to keep you there.    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
That memory burns, sweetness sizzling along your veins until it sears, hurts you so bad as you remember you don't have her anymore.   
  
Whenever these bouts of remembrance take you, Null places its head on your lap. You run your hands down its back, moved that despite its suffering it still finds way into comforting you. And perhaps, for you, it's the same.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Your zubat becomes yours when he tries to feed on you while you sleep out in the field, and despite waking up, you just look at him in mild annoyance and amusement because he's so clumsy about it. He has no qualms getting into your pokéball, impressed at your patience with him.   
  
Your sneasel follows you until you catch him after wrestling with him barehanded to get back the pearls he was trying to steal. It seems ironic, but you think you understand. When most trainers will immediately put their pokémon against any wilds, you faced him personally and didn't care to faint him. You guess you would want in with a trainer like that, too.   
  
Your riolu was a steal, rather a steal of a steal. Team Skull robbed an egg, ended up even cracking it, and the riolu hatched out with a completely useless arm and misangled collarbone. You took him before anyone could make decisions about his "worth in cash" then. And he wanted to fight for you. He even got rid of his limp arm to try and prove to you that he felt ready.   
  
Humans will veer away from you, unless they want a challenge, but pokémon take to you like cutieflies to nectar. You wished that surprised you.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
You never wanted to return to Aether, not so soon, and that's why you left.   
  
You're on the verge of shaking.   
  
"Gladion?" Hau asks you, waves a hand in front. You have to steel yourself and say that the room behind you was dangerous, for him and Soley and Moone to head forward.   
  
You should've gone with him, because your memories are threatening to suffocate you.   
  
_ They tried to take you by force, you shouldn't be there, you weren't supposed to find out. The employees were trainers, had fearsome pokémon in their bidding. They were supposed to be protecting pokémon, but those three stuck in cryogenesis - what were they going for? _ __  
__  
_ You were upset, you were scared, they were manhandling you because you wanted to go in deeper and they wouldn't let you. Mana, Luzei and Salmi were livid at the way they were treating you. They attacked. _ __  
__  
_ Everything was extremely quick, it was not like a trainer-to-trainer battle like TV would show or like he'd see his mother doing. He wasn't doing any commanding. The employees were not saying names or moves, but rather yelling to subdue or raze them at any cost. The flames were charring the walls. Flashes of all colors shone upon the previously calmly tense room. Everything was spiraling out of control, and when you were able to free yourself of someone's grasp, a primeape slammed you to the ground and took the breath from your lungs. _ __  
__  
_ Shouting all around. You saw more light, enveloping Salmi - making him a brand new salazzle. He released a dragon pulse that shook and cracked the walls. It probably hit someone. You don't feel the primeape on you anymore, but you can't stand, your vision is blurry and hazy. You see a smudge of black in your vision and fangs grasp at your shirt, lifting you momentarily before you were let go - Mana's scream echoed down to your very core. _ __  
__  
_ All you wanted was for it to end. You were young and had no strength. You couldn't do a thing. Not even see what was really happening. _ __  
__  
_ But when the cloud seemed to lift there were several employees unconscious, some with serious burns, bloodied, coughing. And the three salamanders were dead. _ __  
__  
_ You remember screaming, so loud your throat wanted to tear and it might be heard by the upper floors. You scrabbled to see if Mana still had a pulse. There was so much blood and molten poison. Burnt smoke and dread overwhelmed any sweet scent the three had left. But one of those humans still standing nabbed him and shoved a cloth in your mouth and nose until you passed out. _ __  
  
_ Most of the employeed had to be taken to a hospital after that, but they were all alive. So were their pokémon for all he knew. But Mana, Salmi and Luzei didn't return. Gone. It seemed it was not anyone's intentions to keep them alive, and your luck might simply rest in the fact you are the president's son. _ __  
__  
_ Lillie was there for you, comforted you as you cried. But you couldn't bear to stay in your bed, that still smelled of  _ her _. _ __  
__  
_ Your sister took you out to the ocean, to swim with you, until you were both too exhausted to think, as finneons drove you to keep going. _ __  
__  
_ After avoiding your mother until you could not escape, you told her you didn't understand anything that you saw. With how she's changed, you thought she would maybe pat your head and mutter an empty "good boy", but she went ahead and explained. Said these were being raised to be protectors of Alola from Ultra Beasts. You acted like a cold, edged slab of stone, and like you were believing her. You didn't. Not once did she mention the pokémon that were coldly killed in a so-called Paradise. _ __  
__  
_ But Faba was more see-through. He said you wouldn't be allowed to have pokémon, and the way he said it made it clear your salandit and salazzles - your friends and lover - were entirely gone. _ __  
__  
_ When you came back there later on, after finding out all you could, and saved one Type:Null, there were still dents and cracks from the battle that took place then.  _ __  
__  
  
Null had also been put down after rampaging against their cruelty, but at least it was alive.   
  
It was alive and saved, that's what mattered now, you insisted to yourself as you looked down at it, almost keeling over from the pain of the memories. And there was still Lillie and Cosmog, needing to be saved as well, and that's why they were all here, together with you.   
  
You really are too emotional, and through your golbat whose scales are coming to shed a violet tone, you find that you're glad for it, that your emotion was not lost for all your mother put you through.   
  
  
  
Your pokémon, said to evolve only through trust and loyalty, are there in no time.   
  
  


Later you find your mother has somehow lived through visiting the Ultra Dimension, and that's more than you could hope for. Guzma and Wicke and Kukui all say you should take over Aether while she's taken to treatment. So you do. You want reforms. You want more space for pokémon. You think of erecting a memorial of sorts for your murdered salamanders.   
  
  
Moone has come to see you. She's relaxed. She could have gotten the champion title instead of Soley, a bare miss compromising the rest of the match for her team. This could be understood as unbearably frustrating for most, but she was chill about it; it meant she had enough power to claim the champion title from him if only she reached out.   
  
Words are unsure and Moone doesn't know whether to congratulate you or not. Your current leading of the foundation is due to your mother being unable to do much at all right now, after all. You thank her, for your once caring mother and for the smiles your sister has been able to give lately. Being something of a young prince now, you didn't have to sneak to unfreeze the other two Type:Nulls, and you prepared them as gifts.   
  
"I wrote its Pokédex entry myself." You mutter as you hand over the ball, and then all the CDs for its evolution, because you're sure Moone is loving enough to get it to evolve.   
  
Silvally, was the new name you gave it, so that's what you wrote on the Pokédex as well, but the two Alola-naturalizing trainers will be free to name theirs as they wish.   
  
It loves you dearly now, like any naturally organic or egg-born pokémon could. It inspires fear and respect, ruling over its previous prison. It could become any type and thus beat down any who would endanger you. It licks your face, recalls its fairy memory to soothe you through lullabies, recalls its grass nature to rub sleep spores on your temples when you overwork yourself, and when you feel ready, it phases into fire to huddle you to its warm body.    
  
  
  
  
  
You're healing. You didn't enjoy the festival of Soley's crowning, you didn't move on to Kanto with your family.    
  
You haven't told anyone about Mana yet. But you know you should. You have to get it off your chest. A human, you mean; Hau or Moone or Soley or even Lillie. Perhaps even the professor. You wouldn't want your pokémon to try and compare themselves to her or the salandits, not this soon.   
  
  
  
  
  
Your weavile ended up leading you to one man named Grimsley. A veteran, hardened trainer. His way around you is that of someone who sees through you or as if he has known you for years.   
  
"I think I know a story that will comfort you."   
  
A Dark-type specialist, he looks shady, but you know not to judge as you do not look any more trustworthy, just younger. He orders Tapu Cocoa for you both and you stride into Ula'Ula Meadow for a long conversation.   



End file.
